Review: JEKYLL & HYDE, Reading Rep Theatre

"You see I have this friend, Dr Jekyll"

With these words, a familiar tale is told - a chilling campfire story that trades the warm glow of a flickering flame for an enveloping darkness pierced by white lights and smothered in a thick, ominous haze.

Reading Rep Theatre's intimate black box studio space is the setting for a menacing one-person performance of Robert Louis Stevenson's gothic horror, one that challenges its audience with morally grey assertions while keeping them pinned to the edge of their seats. Director Michael Fentiman has overseen a spine-tingling atmosphere throughout with expert use of monochrome lighting and a meticulously effective sound design (the brilliant work of Emily Irish and Richard Hammarton, respectively), and in casting the lone performer on stage, he has reunited with a previous collaborator.

Audrey Brisson, who is best known to audiences for her breakout performance as the titular character in the recent musical adaptation of Amélie, is a quirky intrigue at 4'10". With little capacity to seem towering and imposing, Brisson has instead perfected the subtleties that are available to her, her ever widening eyes and steadily creeping sneer betray volumes about the conflict raging within the respectable Victorian gentlemen she portrays. In a gripping later moment of the play, it's Brisson's unflinchingly fixed stare that proves as unnerving as any hulking Hyde ever has, a glint in each of her eyes like starlight reflected in a dark, empty ocean.

Though The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has, not unlike the character it concerns, metamorphosed over the years, at its roots is an external protagonist. This adaptation by Gary McNair being unusually faithful to the original story, Brisson primarily plays John Utterson, a troubled witness to his friend's descent into malevolence. For the highly stratified Victorian society that first read this tale, perhaps Utterson's insight into the story's moral quandary was the most appealing, but today's audience yearns for a first-hand testimonial of the reduction of an upright individual to villainy. They want to hear from Jekyll, and it's conspicuous that we largely don't.

Though McNair is smart to infuse this still period retelling (£100 of hush money gives the game away) with glimpses of contemporary humour, his fidelity to the book's original perspective means its dramatic shortcomings become theatrical limitations. There is no subplot, no hint of a female character and precious little levity. Albeit a single, seventy-minute act, there is room for this interpretation to widen its scope beyond the individual plot arc it perpetrates.

It is an admittedly formidable challenge to render such a well-known plot twist thrilling, and there is a charming release of delicately crafted tension when Brisson's Utterson dryly acknowledges this. Up against this, Fentiman and his creative team have done well to utilise all the tools at their disposal: an array of lights on three sides of the stage as well as lining the three-foot raised grate Brisson is staged upon and an imposing door that floats in an upstage corner.

Consequentially, though the inherited Victorian narrative is a little unadventurous by today's standard, the atmosphere in which it is relayed is masterful. Theatrical thrill seekers can expect few offerings eerier than Reading Rep's this October.

Jekyll & Hyde is at Reading Rep Theatre until 29 October

Photo Credit: Harry Elletson Photography

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